Steven Truscott play relives famous murder case

Innocence Lost

MONTREAL — If truth is stranger than fiction, how strange is it for an investigative journalist to watch a fictional play about a real-life famous murder case he has spent 15 years covering?

Very strange — and very powerful.

Beverley Cooper’s Innocence Lost: A Play About Steven Truscott moves to the National Arts Centre in Ottawa from Feb. 27 to March 16 after it wraps up a successful run Feb. 24 at Montreal’s Centaur Theatre.

Directed by Roy Surette, the play takes you back to the innocence of the 1950s when, as I found out speaking to the children and adults who witnessed the events around the murder and the trial, TV was black and white and so were our uncritical attitudes toward the justice system.

As a teenager, Truscott had been condemned to hang in 1959 for the murder and rape of a 12-year-old classmate, Lynne Harper, at an air force base near Clinton, Ont.

As one of Truscott’s friends, looking back at those terrible days, told me: “The adults had gone mad, wild in fear and deception; the children, wrenched from their innocence. And so it was the end of anything that could’ve been called childhood.”

Cooper’s play captures that hysteria and panic, mixing black and white film footage with exquisite detail as to the clothes of the time and a fine ensemble of young actors who, in their voices, their body language and their eyes, transmit the hopes and fears and confusion of children swept up in a tragedy.

In an almost journalistic, narrative style — most of the time the characters talk directly to the audience — they recount the complicated twists and turns of the story and relive key scenes.

Truscott’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison and he spent a decade behind bars before being paroled — still a convicted murderer.

I first met the real Steven Truscott in 1997 when he decided to come forward after decades of living under an assumed name to clear his name. I worked on a CBC documentary, then wrote the book, Until You Are Dead: Steven Truscott’s Long Ride Into History, which investigates the miscarriage of justice.

It took 10 years but, after a long battle led by his wife Marlene and a determined legal team, Truscott’s sentence was struck down by the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2007, almost five decades after the story began.

After a recent performance, I talked at length with the actors, some of whom had well-thumbed and marked up copies of my book.

They wanted to know what some of the real people they were playing were like; I wanted to know how they try to recreate reality without imitating it, how they get into the skins of their characters to reveal a different dimension of storytelling.

“We’re detectives, a bit like you,” said Fiona Reid, one of Canada’s finest actresses, who does a marvellous job embodying Isabel LeBourdais, the brave journalist who first brought to light the flaws in Truscott’s conviction back in the 1960s. “We scratch and scratch to try to find what lies underneath the surface.”

Of course, Cooper’s play mixes real people and events with composite and made-up characters. We journalists have to stick to the facts as they are. But we still try to evoke and, yes, even recreate a dramatic sense of time and place.

As we like to say in our profession, a good story is real life with the boring parts cut out.